The potato is turning into increasingly integral to diets worldwide together with even Asian international locations like China the place rice is the normal staple meals. Building on this work, we are able to now implement genome-assisted breeding of recent potato varieties that might be extra productive and likewise proof against local weather change – this might have a big impact on delivering meals safety within the many years to return,” says Prof. Korbinian Schneeberger concerning the potential unlocked by his research.
Shopping for potatoes on a market immediately, it’s nicely attainable that the client might be going residence with a spread that was already out there greater than 100 years in the past. This is a testomony to the enduring recognition of conventional potato varieties. However, it additionally highlights the shortage of genetic variation of prevailing potato varieties. This can have stark penalties, most dramatically throughout the Irish famine of the 1840s, the place for a number of years almost your entire potato crop rotted within the floor, and tens of millions of individuals in Europe suffered from hunger just because the one selection that was grown was not proof against newly rising tuber blight. During the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and plant breeders succeeded in reaching massive will increase within the yields of a lot of our main crop staples like rice or wheat. However, the potato has seen no comparable increase, and efforts to breed new varieties with increased yields have remained largely unsuccessful to the present day.
Before the potato was acknowledged as edible, it was grown in Europe as a decorative plant. The pollen within the massive flowers is often collected by bumblebees for pollination. In the current research, genomes from particular person pollen grains had been analyzed to provide the primary full map of a potato genome. Credit: Ulrich Pollmann, 2022
The motive for that is easy however has confirmed troublesome to deal with – as an alternative of inheriting one copy of each chromosome from each the daddy and from the mom (as in people) potatoes inherit two copies of every chromosome from every guardian, making them a species with 4 copies of every chromosome (tetraploid). Four copies of every chromosome additionally imply 4 copies of every gene, and this makes it extremely difficult and time-consuming to generate new varieties that harbor a desired mixture of particular person properties; what’s extra, a number of copies of every chromosome additionally make the reconstruction of the potato genome a far higher technical problem than was the case for the human genome.
Researchers within the group of Prof. Korbinian Schneeberger have overcome this longstanding hurdle and had been capable of generate the primary full meeting of a potato genome utilizing a easy but elegant trick. Instead of making an attempt to distinguish the 4, typically very comparable, chromosome copies from one another, Korbinian Schneeberger along with Hequan Sun and colleagues circumvented this drawback by sequencing the DNA of large numbers of individual pollen cells. In contrast to all other cells, each pollen cell contains only two random copies of each chromosome; this allowed the scientists to reduce the complexity of the problem and finally to reconstruct the sequence of the entire genome.
An overview of the complete DNA sequence of cultivated potato has the potential of greatly facilitating breeding and has been an ambition of scientists and plant breeders alike for many years already. With this information in hand, scientists can now more easily identify gene variants responsible for desirable or undesirable traits, a first step towards incorporating or excluding them during breeding.
Reference: “Chromosome-scale and haplotype-resolved genome assembly of a tetraploid potato cultivar” by Hequan Sun, Wen-Biao Jiao, Kristin Krause, José A. Campoy, Manish Goel, Kat Folz-Donahue, Christian Kukat, Bruno Huettel and Korbinian Schneeberger, 3 March 2022, Nature Genetics.
DOI: 10.1038/s41588-022-01015-0
